Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday October 08, 2012 @08:58AM
from the no-burning-desire dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "For more than 50 years, physicists have been eager to achieve controlled fusion, an elusive goal that could potentially offer a boundless and inexpensive source of energy. Now Bill Sweet writes in IEEE Spectrum that the National Ignition Facility (NIF), now five billion dollars over its original budget and years behind schedule, deserves to be recognized as perhaps the biggest and fattest white elephant of all time. With the total tab for NIF now running to an estimated $7 billion, the laboratory has been pulling out all the stops to claim success is just around the corner. 'We didn't achieve the goal,' said Donald L. Cook, an official at the National Nuclear Security Administration who oversees the laser project but rather than predicting when it might succeed, he added in an interview, 'we're going to settle into a serious investigation' of what caused the unforeseen snags. On one hand, the laser's defenders point out, hard science is by definition risky, and no serious progress is possible without occasional failures. On the other, federal science initiatives seldom disappoint on such a gargantuan scale, and the setback comes in an era of tough fiscal choices and skepticism about science among some lawmakers. 'If the main goal is to achieve a power source that could replace fossil fuels, we suspect the money would be better spent on renewable sources of energy that are likely to be cheaper and quicker to put into wide use,' editorializes the NY Times. 'Congress will need to look hard at whether these "stockpile stewardship" and long-term energy goals can be pursued on a smaller budget.'"

The NIF is part of the military essentially. While it has the side-benefit of allowing us to investigate inertial confined fusion, I thought the whole point of places like that was as a way to test nuclear weapons without actually setting them off?

Yes, in this case it isn't even some secret mission, but one of the reasons the program was set up. The NIF's goal is to improve our understanding of fusion. There are two stated applications for doing so: 1) improving designs for possible future fusion-power reactors; and 2) improving understanding of how matter behaves in a thermonuclear explosion.

The news seems to mostly be about #1, but really #2 is a pretty key part of the reason it exists.

Given that the topic is Fussion, and the rhetoric from Congress is negative. One has to wonder who is the money backing this congressional outcry? Who would benefit from America not obtaining Fussion capability?

While it has the side-benefit of allowing us to investigate inertial confined fusion, I thought the whole point of places like that was as a way to test nuclear weapons without actually setting them off?

I've wondered this myself. The design of it seems to make little sense (to me anyway) for use as a sustainable source of power. You blast the target and hopefully get a fusion reaction but then what? There's no turbine or continuous generation of power and the design of it pretty much seems to preclude such use. It makes sense a way to study fusion reactions (and related weapons) but not so much for power generation. Maybe there is hope for some spin-off technology if it was successful but really it se

There's no turbine or continuous generation of power and the design of it pretty much seems to preclude such use.

The walls heat up. That energy is going somewhere. Tell your local thermodynamics engineer, "You dump 10 MW of electricity into it, and magically the walls get 200 MW of heat at a million degrees or so, now do your Rankine/Carnot thing and generate 100 MW of electricity". Stand back and let the engineer work, and ta da !

Except there's no way to reload the fuel after each shot (which lasts for a tiny fraction of a second), there's no way to recharge the lasers fast enough even if you could get the fuel in place, and there's no guarantee that the equipment can safely operate at temperatures that make extraction practical. So no, it's not that simple.

Whereas the major competition, tokamaks and ITER, simply require you to run -263 degrees pipes at less than 70 centimeters of a 1 million degrees plus fusion reaction. Those reactors have used over 10 times the "way over the top" budget of the NIF, is no closer to fusion than they are, and has been researched double as long...

I'm not joining the bandwagon of "ITER will never work", just pointing out that it's not exactly looking like a great investement at the moment.

Don't do many science experiments, do you? If you had to design a fusion reactor, for which you need to figure out how to make fusion self-sustaining, would you (a) build all the support structure of turbines, steam pipes, etc. as well as the design and build the fusion reactor, or (b) figure out how to make fusion self-sustaining and then worry later about the support structure? Hint, you rarely if ever build the engineering before figuring out the science since how the science comes out will indicate how

Since you "asked", my first real job was as a research assistant in a laser and plasma physics lab working on an experiment to study hypersonic shock waves for fusion research. I also have an engineering degree with a minor in applied physics. But thanks for assuming I'm ignorant without actually knowing anything about me.

It's an experiment, not a finalized design.

I'm well aware that it is an experiment. However it also is an experiment that almost certainly cannot be translated into a working power plant. It is designed to study weapons and if we happen to learn something useful for fusion power along the way that is terrific. Don't get me wrong, I support research endeavors like the NIF. I think there will be some terrific engineering and scientific spin offs. I just don't think the sort of research they are doing is likely to lead to fusion as a power source. I'd be delighted to be wrong but I doubt I am.

I agree. I also support continued research at NIF. The problem with large government funded projects like this, however, are that they tend to draw funding away from a lot of other novel approaches. For example, we haven't funded any molten salt reactor research since the early 1970's. The point of research is to investigate all the most promising leads, but when congress chooses to run with a specific technology, it shuts down competing research. I'm not saying there's potential in the Bussard Polywel

Their goal isn't to generate power. Their goal is to prove that it's possible to generate power.

The only way to truly prove that it is possible to generate power IS to generate power. There is no mechanism in this experiment by which a sustained fusion reaction will occur nor is there any effort I can discern by which they are attempting to actually generate electricity. It is a research experiment for nuclear weapons from which we might learn something useful down the road for fusion power.

You really don't get it, do you? You can't generate electricity unless the energy coming out of the fusion reaction is greater than that used to generate the reaction.And nobody knows how to do that yet. Until we do, adding turbines and generators is like adding a spoiler to a car that doesn't have an engine.

Believe it or not I do get it. What I'm pointing out is that this facility can at most do basic research. Important stuff that and I'm a big proponent. But it isn't going to lead to a workable fusion power plant. That isn't what it is designed to study. I get that we still haven't generated a controlled sustained reaction. What I also get is that the NIF isn't going to get us one. It is designed with other goals in mind.

You can't generate electricity unless the energy coming out of the fusion reaction is greater than that used to generate the reaction.

No one is going to generate a SUSTAINABLE supply of power with the design of the

Their goal isn't to generate power. Their goal is to prove that it's possible to generate power.

The only way to truly prove that it is possible to generate power IS to generate power. There is no mechanism in this experiment by which a sustained fusion reaction will occur nor is there any effort I can discern by which they are attempting to actually generate electricity. It is a research experiment for nuclear weapons from which we might learn something useful down the road for fusion power.

Actually, Step 1 is to figure a way to get a sustainable fusion reaction going without melting down the containment vessel. Once we get there, then we start adding the power generation side of things, and start tweaking the design a few (dozen? hundred? thousand?) times to get the last possible erg out of it.

I hate to break it you you, but much of what we do in basic science research is dual-use. It can be used for military applications, or purely scientific applications. Doing stockpile stewardship without nuclear tests is not "getting around" nuclear test ban treaties. It's maintaining the integrity of our increasingly smaller nuclear stockpile as a credible deterrent.

This overwhelming deterrent capability is part of the reason why the world has seen no major global conflict for seven decades [lanl.gov], and has had the longest period of peace without global conflict for over five centuries. Tens of millions of people died in WWI and WWII.

We maintain a credible deterrent so it's clear that no one can ever strike us first [youtube.com] without the certainty of themselves also being destroyed -- and if our principles and ideals and those of our allies are something you care about, then that should be important to you.

A world where the US doesn't maintain an overwhelming deterrent to forces which espouse principles and ideals counter to those of freedom and liberal democracy is not a pretty place [cnn.com].

(Note to people who think that the US is what's wrong with the world: you are sorely in need of historical perspective -- or, any perspective. The US is not perfect, but the US and West has done far more for the benefit of human life and humanity, on the whole, than any other nation, especially those with Communist, Socialist, or totalitarian systems of government. Wake up.)

- National security (stockpile stewardship [llnl.gov]- Basic fusion science [llnl.gov]- Understanding the origins of the basic building blocks of the universe [llnl.gov]

I hate to break it you you, but much of what we do in basic science research is dual-use. It can be used for military applications, or purely scientific applications.

So despite your condescending tone to someone you know nothing about, you acknowledge that the first purpose of this facility is weapons research. It also is useful for some basic research which is vitally important. We're on the same page.

That's pretty much a fancy way to say it is a way to test nuclear fusion without setting off any actual bombs. Amaze me with how you think that is not a way to get around the test ban treaties. While I didn't bring it up, I don't think anyone is particularly worried

The "you" to which I was referring in my post is the royal or general "you", for what it's worth, not you personally.

I'm also not saying that the only overwhelming deterrent is our nuclear deterrent, but it's part of our deterrent capability.

Things which are simply not covered by test ban treaties are not "getting around" test bans. When you say "getting around", you make it seem as if it is somehow a shameful, underhanded, dirty trick to "get around" a treaty. Is using supercomputers to simulate nuclear de

When my father was defending his PhD in fusion physics at the University of Wisconsin (1974), he had some very impressive results: 2 data runs, zero standard deviation, date-stamped polaroid photos of every step in each. The zero standard deviation was challenged; the response was to pull out the photos.

He got the PhD. But he didn't continue in the field. Partly why, may be that when he was asked about the future of practical nuclear fusion, he pointed out that for the last 40 years back then, practical

you know in the early days of fission they said the same thing about uranium.

The trick is to understand it enough to make it work, and then to understand it enough to make it stable, and then cheap.

the real problem is the major jump in material sciences needed to control it. fission is easy as it wants to decay. Fusion will be a long way off but solar, and wind while necessary to augment and in a few isolated cases dominate aren't stable enough for the high energy demands of our society

The odd thing is uranium based fission for power generation never did become particularly stable and certainly isn't cheap.

The only reason we did it was because we wanted to make bombs and dual use of Uranium and Plutonium mitigated some of the costs and provided some civilian cover for what was basically a weapons program to produce Plutonium and enriched Uranium. Probably exactly the same thing Iran is doing today.

Japan, Germany and Canada are among the few countries that pursued fission purely as a powe

Japan, Germany and Canada are among the few countries that pursued fission purely as a power source using them to make bombs. Last time I checked Japan and Germany are both abandoning the concept because they've realized its not safe(stable) nor it is it very economical.

Last time I looked, Germany and Japan were getting NIMBYed on their nuclear plants. I've been expecting the Japanese peasants to grab torches and pitchforks ever since Fukushima got whammied.

there isn't enough Lithium in the world to make nuclear fusion a practical power source, using the DT reaction.

Yes there is. Most quotes of lithium reserves include only a few tens of millions of tonnes located in salt deposits, because these can be cheaply extracted. But the oceans contain another 230 billion tons [wikipedia.org]. It costs much more to extract lithium from seawater, but that cost is still negligible compared to the value of the energy from a fusion reactor. The world has enough lithium to last for millenniums even if we use it for 100% of our power needs.

There's also the significant expectation that practical fusion reactors are likely to lead to more capable fusion processes once we have actually built applied, working examples of the technology. While it's not known, I would be amazed if once D-T fusion was viable, that was the end game of man-made fusion power (i.e. if it was not at all possible to step it up to D-D).

Depends how long you're thinking. In the long run it's still fusion, but one has to imagine that between asteroid mining and the cheap launch capability we might gain from fusion-powered rockets, we could assemble a Dyson-sphere like construct of satellites to harvest power off the big reactor above us.

That's it? This is what they claim is the biggest white elephant in our budget?

It isn't the 700 billion spent on Defense, or the 400 billion we spend on medicare, it's the god damn 7 billion spent on trying to obtain controlled fusion. Don't misunderstand me, it sounds like this project is wasting a ton of money, and something should be done about it. But claiming it is the single biggest flop in our budget, even as hyperbole, is laughable at best, and ill informed at worst.

A white elephant isn't just expensive, its cost is more than its worth. High amounts of dollars spent are a necessary condition, but not sufficient; you also need a lack of results or value. You may disagree, but many people think we're getting essential value from the money we spend on defense and Medicare. So what you have a disagreement about values, which doesn't make the opposing view "laughable at best, and ill informed at worst."

That's 7 billion over the lifetime of the project. The 700 Billion to the military is per year. In fact, I would honestly assert that those costs could be controlled by doing more in-house and less using contractors, but reversing the privatization of government jobs is really unpopular with congress for some reason.

The other $2.7 Trillion goes for the rest of the discretionary budget (roughly $400-500 Billion). The remaining $2.3-2.2 Trillion goes for SS and the rest of the entitlements. Defense is now at one of its lowest points with respect to GDP since WW2. You won't be balancing anything by taking it out of Defense. That isn't saying Defense could not be streamlined, it could, but it won't solve the budget problem.

Yeah, problem is people don't like the answer to the budget problems. The only solution is halving social services (at least), and reducing it further as population increases. And that assessment is dated - it doesn't include the Obamacare extra expenditures.

And the money spent on DHS and TSA isn't a white elephant? Oh, I forgot they now have all the dirt on their source of funding, and are sooo important in the creation of the police state we're heading towards in headlong fashion.

There needs to be a very detailed account of what these people have been doing with public funds. Renewable energy in the form of wind, solar, tidal and geothermal generation cannot replace fossil fuels fast enough to keep Global Warming within reasonable limits, but all show promise.

We've already wasted too much time, and now we need some kind of generation technology to bridge the gap. Imagine what that money could have done helping develop a small, safe, easy-to-build thorium reactor, or overcoming the issues delaying wholesale change to LED lighting.

That completely ignores what should be near the top of the energy agenda, namely conservation. The US, for instance, uses about twice as much energy per capita as Germany, and yet there isn't a significant difference in quality of life.

And it's interesting that when somebody who knows what they're talking about proposes a cheap and effective measure, like painting rooftops white so they absorb less heat, they are mostly made fun of and/or ignored.

Well, I'd probably laugh them out of the room because the last time I painted my roof at all was... never. That's because of all the shingles on it.

That said, there are white shingles out there, and there's even a tax credit for it.

On the other hand, white roofs eventually looks like ass after being exposed to nature for awhile. You gain a marginally cooler roof, but your property values plummet because your roof looks like its twice as old as the black one next door because you can see every blotch and b

For typical US suburban single family construction, painting roofs white doesn't make any sense. Homes have attics, and those attics are ventilated. The more sunlight the roof absorbs, the more air gets pumped through the attic. In my home, the attic is reasonably comfortable even in 30C weather with clear skies -- the air temperature right above the insulation is perhaps 2 C above ambient -- and that's a pretty run-of-the-mill house from 1979. Sure it higher if you measure it elsewhere, but only temperatur

To put that number into perspective that is about 2 days of deficit spending (not total spending for those 2 days just the deficit) for the US government.

...for a project that few people really understand during tough economic times. While I'm very much in support of science projects like this, it should surprise no one that stuff like this is going to be first on the chopping block come budget time. Voters don't turn out because their favorite science project got the budgetary ax but they do turn out when medicare is threatened. Big budget science comes with big political risks. If it works, great but if it doesn't it is an easy target and it hurts th

I hate it when people claim to be "putting something into perspective" but are really "spinning something marginally related."

If tax revenue were to decline.. or if the deficit were to increase.. your "perspective" makes this spending look better and better.. thats only 1 day of deficit spending.. thats only half a day of deficit spending.. thats only an hour of deficit spending..

Your "perspective" is actually the opposite of the way we should think about it.. Its just spin.

There are two proposed approaches for fusion power generation: tokamak and ICF. ITER tests the tokamak approach and the National Ignition Facility tests the ICF approach. Thanks to the NIF we now know exactly what ICF is and isn't capable of. I'd call that an excellent return on investment.

In addition, one of ICF's main goals was to understand the behavior of matter undergoing fusion, which it has contributed extensively to. That's useful scientific knowledge there on its own, but perhaps more relevant to NIF's not-so-secret secondary purpose, it's also been used to improve simulations used in nuclear weapon design and maintenance (since tests are banned, data from experiments like the NIF is very important).

Now you may or may not think improving our nuclear weapon stockpile is a great use of

The experiment was a success. The outcome a failure.
There are two proposed approaches for fusion power generation: tokamak and ICF. ITER tests the tokamak approach and the National Ignition Facility tests the ICF approach. Thanks to the NIF we now know exactly what ICF is and isn't capable of. I'd call that an excellent return on investment.

Weird, you seem to be at odds with much of the article:

With the total tab for NIF now running to an estimated $7 billion, the laboratory has been pulling out all the stops to claim success is just around the corner. At the beginning of July, it announced that 15 years of work had paid off in "an historic record-breaking laser shot," in which 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target." The lab's leaders predict that "ignition" -- the point where the 192 lasers actually deliver more energy than they consume -- could occur as early as next year.

So help me out here, if we now know the outcome is a failure why are the project leads asking for more funding and trying to convince us it's just around the corner? Maybe next year, possibly almost sure that it might could happen if the possibilities are totally just almost there.

Sounds more like "It's 20 years off. Wait, you're pulling our funding?! But it might happen as early as next year!"

The NIF has been inching closer and closer to ignition for a long time; it really is right around the corner from a scientific standpoint. And it would be an accomplishment, don't get me wrong, but the engineering to actually produce power with such a system would be another $10billion effort on top of what the NIF has spent. Those big lasers? They take a long time to recharge. The fuel doesn't enter the chamber automatically or quickly. And there's no way to actually harvest the energy produced by the

There are two proposed approaches for fusion power generation: tokamak and ICF. ITER tests the tokamak approach and the National Ignition Facility tests the ICF approach. Thanks to the NIF we now know exactly what ICF is and isn't capable of. I'd call that an excellent return on investment.

You're obviously stuck back in the mid 20th Century when every research project didn't have to show immediate quarterly payback. We don't do that anymore. It's not "efficient".

There are at least three. The "Polywell" [wikipedia.org] (which uses a form of inertial electrostatic confinement fusion) is yet another approach.

There's also some ways to generate extremely inefficient table top fusion (eg, the Farnsworth fusor [wikipedia.org]). Some day we might figure out how to make those efficient enough to generate power.

Farnsworth fusor's are physically due to losses due to material escaping confinement or slamming into the electrical grid in the middle. No matter how you tweak one, the Farnsworth design won't make energy - too many loss processes. Great for desktop neutrons though.

The Polywell was designed to fix the problems with Farnsworth fusor's by replacing the physical grid with a virtual one composed of focussed electrons. The problem is, the guy who did a lot of the work didn't keep great lab notes (and is now dea

The Z-machine has not demonstrated fusion. They demonstrated, quite successfully, that their simulations of imploding tubes match the experiment. They are hoping that the imploding tube will contain fusion. That will be shown in early 2014 AFAICT. Yeah, they say "by the close of 2013". Uh huh, and I've got a bridge to sell.

The scientists at NIF have it all wrong; if they want to save their hides they need to get someone from the military to claim they need fusion for... I don't know, fighting terrorists or whatever. Just look at the rail gun--what a spectacular failure. Sure, we can make heavy things go fast, but they still haven't solved basic problems like how keep plasma from electrical arcing from melting the rails. Or the non-lethal microwave device that doesn't work in a light rain. Hypersonic missiles? Or even the myriad "totally necessary" fighter jets with backup engines being developed, just in case. What about space-based missile defense? Maybe NIF could claim that they could retrain their lasers on ICBMs? Clearly, if the military is into something things like price and feasibility are not a problem.

In all seriousness, how the f*ck can anyone take Congress seriously when it comes to spending? Here we have $7 billion spent trying to discover limitless sources of energy, but ohhhh, they're over budget and that sounds like a big number! The Big Dig (in Boston) was federally subsidized and cost around $8 billion and it was made so poorly (due to corruption and a lack of oversight) that some poor woman was crushed when a ceiling tile fell on her car. And what about the trillion dollar tax cuts enacted in the first term of W? Or the other trillion (give or take) spent on invading Iraq for no particular reason? I don't buy this "we have to start somewhere" nonsense of budget cuts when nothing defense-related is even questioned and just letting the Bush tax cuts expire as they were supposedly originally intended is a non-starter, not to mention the insanity of the blanket 15% capital gains rate (note: you don't tax money, it's fungible, you tax the actions of people and legal entities).

If anything, Congress should be embarrassed by how little they appropriate to science and how many of its members are on the record as refusing to accept Darwinian evolution or anthropogenic global warming (which probably explains their willingness to cut funding for NIF.)

Sure, we can make heavy things go fast, but they still haven't solved basic problems like how keep plasma from electrical arcing from melting the rails.

Do the rails cost less than a cruise missile? I've heard the more recent versions can fire several shots before they need to be replaced; if you can fire your railgun 5 times for 10 hours of maintanence and $50000 worth of steel that easily replaces 5 cruise missiles (at a cost of $500,000 each).

It was clear from the start that this was the case, that this was the primary reason of building it.

Why do people keep repeating the propaganda?

Nothing about this project makes any sense at all from a nuclear power perspective. Be it the hugely inefficient, short-lifetime lasers that can be fired about once a day. Just 10% of the energy released from the lasing medium actually reaches the target. Even more energy is wasted creating the laser beam in the first place. Be it the miniscule amounts of *frozen* h

I don't think anyone who knows anything about the NIF has swallowed anything. You're seeing a bunch of people who are reading about it for the first time and the article is talking about it's fusion power research side, which was stated, is only its secondary goal.

What the NIF is there to do is to prove thermonuclear weapons will work without having to test them. Once we have a program to do that, we can ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty (CTBT). Well, that and a few other items on our list

that's a load of bullshit, we already can make functioning nuclear weapons and moreover can accurately model the behavior of our aging stockpile with supercomputers. The NIF does not replicate the conditions in a nuclear weapon, an H bomb uses lithium deuteride which is transmuted by neutrons from the fission trigger into tritium and deuterium, and then x-rays from the primary are used to make a plasma of hydrocarbon foam to put pressure on the TD mix.

The NIF started out attempting to research the tech needed to make a ICF powerplant, but over time they haven't had much success. After a few major rearchitectures and funding shifts across other national labs, they decided to latch on to Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program as their reason for existance. Unfortunatlly, their current direction isn't very helpful to either the original charter, or their new SSMP charter.

One might argue that based on its initial charter, it should have been canceled

I thought it was the other way around, it was the SSMP people that came to ICF. Originally the ICF program was just going to upgrade the Nova system and reuse a lot of their equipment as much as possible. But the SSMP people thought the upgraded Nova facility would not be enough for their own needs, and told they should scrap the Nova upgrade plans which were pretty fleshed out, and build a new facility.

AFAIK, the SSMP was the "golden" grant of $4.5B that came out the the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty efforts. All the national labs wanted a piece of it and a deal was struck. LLNL used their negotiated "piece-of-the-pie" to upgrade their originally proposed upgrade of the NOVA under the guise of closing the loop on the warhead simulation (I think that was part of the ASC Initiative). Basically the LLNL got the money when the getting was good to supercharge their ignition work. Of course the getting is no l

I'm pretty sure it actually has in a bunch of different Tokamak devices, just not sustainably (and with no conversion). That said you are right in that finding out how to do ignition with inertial confinement is kind of a big deal, since we can take that data and say - for example - this is the exact specifications we need to aim for to build ourselves a fusion powered rocket engine.

How much did we spend to buy GM to satisfy the UAW? But we don't have enough $ to fundamentally transform the nature of energy creation for the human race?

Holy shit humans can be stupid sometimes.

I'm a libertarian who believes that government should be as small as possible and do only those things that are best done communally. Like the GPS system. Or figuring out how to harness fusion energy. We cannot do this "commercially" as the cost is too high. But compared to the other stuff that we spend federa

I've read this in a number of places, but science, especially publicly funded science, seems increasingly doomed by "failure" -- ie, when scientists run a study to prove a link between A and B and the science tells them "A and B are not linked".

The headline is "Scientists fail to prove A and B" and the public opinion is that the scientists failed, as if it was a failure of effort, ability or character. It's never explained that the failure to link A and B *isn't* a failure really, it's a success of science

The only thing I can think of that seems halfway rational (not right, but rational) is that its some way of finding "good" scientists whose working theories are more right than wrong. The guy whose theory proves unprovable is "going down the wrong road" and it would be pointless to continue supporting him, if you follow that line of reasoning.

But my understanding was that this kind of vetting was done BEFORE the experiment or study was done. You didn't fund studies with sketchy theories whose

Apparently the author is not familiar with the F-35. The estimated total cost of that project is $1 trillion dollars, or 142 NIF Controlled Fusion projects. But we can't cut the budget on military pet projects because that would just be evil.

nonsense, after four decades and billions of dollars of cold fusion research the only thing discovered is vague evidence of possible unaccounted for heat that has the most likely source in phase changes, galvonic action and absorption of gases in solids than any nuclear process. cold fusion, if it happens at all, won't be useful for powering anything but rather a curiosity like the occassional atom that gets transmuted in your body by neutrinos.

This - times ten. A decade ago a low-level Bush administration appointee of my acquaintance argued that we should disengage entirely from the middle east and divert all the money spent there to research and development of sustainable alternative energy. Like half a trillion a year. A decade later you'd have wasted a bunch of money (there are not that many competent researchers around that you could effectively spend a half-trillion dollars in a year), but you'd probably be pretty close to eliminating our

Or, you know, spend 1T less on whacking tin-pot dicatooar, put $50B into the NIF to make it actually work, another $50B at ITER as a backup and enjoy the $900B savings...

1 billion on solar power satellites,

Also, seriously, since one speculative tech hit a snag and didn't work, your solution is to invest in another that is evel less likely to work eith current tech at a level which will ensure that it will never get aronud to be working.

Â£1b is orders of magnitude too low to get anywhere with solar power satellites. $100b _might_ cut it.

There was the article on/. [slashdot.org] a while back where MIT was answering questions about fusion and it was pointed out that based on the historical cutting of fusion research investment, fusion power is about $80 billion away, and has always been 25 years away because it's budget has been progressively cut.

Or, you know, spend 1T less on whacking tin-pot dicatooar, put $50B into the NIF to make it actually work, another $50B at ITER as a backup and enjoy the $900B savings...

To give some more specific numbers...

All direct military spending to date for the war in Afghanistan alone amounts to roughly $500 billion. What's worse is that the cost has been steadily rising ever since it began - right now we're wasting about $7 billion every month on it.

The thing is this is applied research with a defined goal that's kinda far out there. So a clear forecast of how long it will take and how much it will cost isn't possible. But this is a potentially a multi trillion dollar payout project. So a large expenditure for a low probability it will work may be justified.

It really does need to stuck under the purview of the department of defense. I mean DARPA has had a long term interest in cold-fusion, simply because if it's at all possible they want to know about it - just in case. You'd think the benefits of hot fusion to powering submarines and aircraft carriers would warrant similar interest.